32 The Nation. October 28/November 4, 2019
of compromise between these categories, a
book written in the prose of the world but
containing suggestions that another world is
possible. Thus a poet like Adam, or Lerner,
may write a novel, but we shouldn’t expect
them to be happy about it.
In 10:04, ambivalence toward novel
writing—an ambivalence bordering on
embarrassment—is a running theme. “I
decided to write more fiction—something
I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going
to do,” the narrator, Ben, declares. This
decision is motivated not by aesthetic am-
bition but by financial incentives and eth-
ical responsibility: His “strong six-figure”
book advance will be used to fund fertility
treatments for a friend who wants to have
a child. Since novels have not (yet) become
as unpopular and economically marginal as
poetry, fiction writing represents the only
way to transform his otherwise valueless
art into a viable commodity for a bourgeois
audience. But what Ben ultimately produc-
es is “a novel that dissolves into a poem.”
In 10:04’s increasingly desultory second
half, he goes to a writers’ retreat to work
on his novel, only to find himself working
“on the wrong thing.” “Instead of earning
my advance,” he admits, “I was writing a
poem.... Having monetized the future of
my fiction, I turned my back on it.”
But Lerner himself keeps writing fiction,
and he keeps getting better at it. The Topeka
School is, if not his best, certainly his most
novelistic novel yet. Unlike its predecessors,
which were essentially interior monologues
delivered by characters with voices all but
indistinguishable from Lerner’s, The Tope-
ka School features four distinct protagonists,
their narratives presented variously in the
first, second, and third person. One of these
is Adam Gordon, the neurotic hero of Leav-
ing the Atocha Station, who appears here as a
promising teenager on the verge of leaving
his hometown of Topeka, Kansas, for an
Ivy League university. But whereas Adam’s
voice completely dominates the earlier nov-
el, The Topeka School is more dialogic in its
structure than Lerner’s predecessors. Adam’s
parents, Jonathan and Jane Gordon—both
psychologists—narrate two chapters apiece,
and the novel is punctuated by a series of ital-
icized interludes written from the perspective
of Darren Eberheart, an emotionally dis-
turbed boy in Adam’s class who has dropped
out of school and is living, barely tolerated, on
the margins of Topeka society. The Gordons
are displaced East Coast intellectuals making
a life against the “almost exotically boring
backdrop” of a midsize Midwestern city. Both
are employed at the Foundation, a fictional-
ized version of the Menninger Foundation,
the world-famous psychiatric institute where
the author’s own parents were employed. Jane
is a best-selling Oprah-endorsed author (just
like Harriet Ler ner, Ben Lerner’s mother).
Jonathan specializes in working with “lost
boys”—alienated young men unable to adjust
to the demands of adult society. Darren is one
of his patients.
Unlike his first two fiction works, which
both seemed to be trying to evade the his-
tory of the bourgeois novel, The Topeka
School flirts with a half-dozen traditional
novelistic genres at once. The Topeka School
is a family saga, and it’s a historical novel,
scrupulous about the surface details of the
summer of 1996: Tupac Shakur on every
sound system, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton
on every TV, dial-up modems downloading
pornographic images to desktop computers
with excruciating slowness, “the striptease
of slow bit speed.” It’s a regional novel,
attempting to portray an underrepresented
corner of America in all its peculiarity. It’s a
bildungsroman, chronicling its hero’s prog-
ress toward maturity, and a Künstlerroman,
telling us how and why he becomes an artist.
And it’s a novel of adultery. (How bourgeois
can you get?) It is even, in its own way, a tale
of suspense, suffused with dramatic tension
and the threat of violence. At this juncture
in Lerner’s career, the traditionalism of The
Topeka School is far more surprising than its
avant-gardism. The book finds Lerner at a
crossroads, tempted by the conventions of
the novel even as he continues to insist on
the priority of the poetic.A
s distinct as the narrative voices in The
Topeka School are, they also echo one
another. The novel’s realism exists in
tension with its formalism. The book
is structured around a series of repeat-
ed phrases that constantly send the reader
back to hunt for cross-references, somewhat
impeding the narrative’s momentum. People
speak of remembering things “in the third
person.” Sentences from Herman Hesse’s
1908 story “A Man by the Name of Ziegler,”
which Jonathan reads on the advice of his
analyst and later adapts into a film, recur
frequently, as do references to the Thematic
Apperception Test, which Jonathan adminis-
ters to his patients, and to Duccio di Buon-
insegna’s Madonna and Child. Ordinary social
rituals are observed, again and again, “withthe distance of an anthropologist or ghost.”
These uncanny repetitions work, first and
foremost, as an aesthetic device: They give
the novel a symphonic quality. There are
similar leitmotifs in Leaving the Atocha Station
and 10:04, but the device operates differently
here. In the earlier books, the repetitions
seemed to betoken an obsessive attraction to
pattern for its own sake. In The Topeka School,
this is still true, but the expansion of the
novel’s cast allows Lerner to achieve other
effects as well. In the case of Adam and his
parents, for example, the mysterious parallels
among their narratives can be understood as
a way to stylize the tenets of family-systems
theory, as developed by Murray Bowen and
practiced by Jane (and Harriet Ler ner). Bow-
en’s theory states that “families so profound-
ly affect their members’ thoughts, feelings,
and actions that it often seems as if people
are living under the same ‘emotional skin.’”
Children can’t help taking on their parents’
stresses. Parents experience their children’s
suffering intensely, even when they have no
idea what’s causing it. Jane worries that a
campaign of misogynist harassment against
her is unconsciously affecting her son. Adam
overhears his parents arguing and feels that
he “couldn’t have explained his desire not
to understand the nature of their fight.” Ben
Lerner is exquisitely sensitive to these psy-
chological dynamics, and the echoes across
the Gordons’ narratives are one way of reg-
istering their interconnectedness within the
system that is their family.
At other times, the correspondences ex-
ceed the familial frame. Topeka itself is sub-
ject to doubling. At the beginning of the
novel, Adam enters what he thinks is his
girlfriend Amber’s lakeside house, only to
find that he has trespassed accidentally into
an almost identical prefab unit:Along with the sheer terror of finding
himself in the wrong house, with his
recognition of its difference, was a
sense, because of the houses’ same-
ness, that he was in all the houses
around the lake at once; the sublime
of identical layouts. In each house
she or someone like her was in her
bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep;
legal guardians were farther down the
hall, large men snoring; the faces and
poses in the family photographs on the
mantel might change, but would all
belong to the same grammar of faces
and poses; the elements of the painted
scenes might vary, but not the level of
familiarity and flatness; if you opened
any of the giant stainless steel refriger-The Topeka School
A Novel
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 304 pp. $27